As expected, the FCC today gave its approval to the purchase of bankrupt cable company Adelphia by the nation’s number one and number two operators, Comcast and Time Warner. By a vote of four-to-one, with Commissioner Jonathan Adelstein dissenting (sort of), the Commission greenlighted the $17 bil. buyout of Adelphia, but conditioned the approval on a few content access requirements.
The first: any regional sports network owned by either cable company must go to arbitration in the event of a pricing dispute involving cable’s rivals. The issue here is whether cable operators, Comcast in particular, is withholding its regional sports programming from competitors, thereby handicapping the cable rivals.
Comcast SportsNet in Philadelphia is grandfathered, however, meaning that rival RCN doesn’t get to take advantage of this arbitration requirement. The FCC also ordered that Mid-Atlantic Sports Network and Comcast go to arbitration over fights that Mid-Atlantic has had gaining carriage on Comcast systems.
With that, Comcast now gains around 1.8 million, and Time Warner gains around 3.5 million, net new customers from the carved up Adelphia properties. Together the two companies will represent around 58% of the nation’s cable subscribers, and the ranks of the top cable operators thins considerably. (See table below).
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Top Cable Operators - Post Adelphia |
|||||||||||||||||||
| % of All | |||||||||||||||||||
| Total Subs. | Cable Subs. | ||||||||||||||||||
| BrightHouse* | 2,154,597 | 3% | |||||||||||||||||
| CableOne | 695,464 | 1% | |||||||||||||||||
| Cablevision | 3,065,716 | 5% | |||||||||||||||||
| Charter | 5,913,000 | 9% | |||||||||||||||||
| Comcast | 23,295,000 | 36% | |||||||||||||||||
| Cox* | 6,318,832 | 10% | |||||||||||||||||
| Insight | 1,306,700 | 2% | |||||||||||||||||
| Mediacom | 1,422,000 | 2% | |||||||||||||||||
| Time Warner | 14,539,000 | 22% | |||||||||||||||||
| Total | 58,710,309 | 90% | |||||||||||||||||
| *Estimates | |||||||||||||||||||
| Based on Q1 06 subscriber data. | |||||||||||||||||||
| Total U.S. cable subs. = 65.2 million. | |||||||||||||||||||
| Source: Emerging Media Dynamics, Inc. | |||||||||||||||||||
Cynthia Brumfield at 4:54 PM|Comments(0)
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